doug smith training

A technician may criticize your technique but never your heart, never your intention, never your joy. Hear the feedback from your own place of calm. -- doug smith 

It's fairly easy to get pushed off-center, which makes regular practice at re-centering essential. How do you re-center? What's your favorite way to get back on track, calm your inner wildness and focus? Deep breathes? Meditation? Long walks? Quiet focused attention?  Whatever works, do that. Why not practice right now? -- doug smith  

Healthy self-esteem doesn't mean that you're always right -- it means that you're alright even when you're wrong. -- doug smith

How have you been lately? Disrupted, interrupted, upset? It's a journey through more surprises than any of us figured on. Predictable perhaps, planned for, umm, no. We deal with one crisis after another, day after day. As a dear friend of mine once said (and I paraphrase) "you can have a problem and your upset, or you can have your problem and no upset. Either way you have to deal with it. Why not deal with one problem instead of two?" Things will throw us off-center. There's no benefit to getting upset about being upset. Instead, redirect back to the center. Breathe. -- doug smith

A great person, who used to be a friend of mine, once wrote a song called "Slow Down and Enjoy The View." It was a wonderful song but at the time, neither one of us really had much to slow down from. We had time, we had music, we had friendship, we smiled all of the time. Then we got busy. Life got busy. Work got busy. Does it ever feel to you like you're just too busy? Even in the middle of a crisis, it can feel like there is too much busyness to take care of business.  The other day I was taking a walk and after several minutes realized that I was hardly experiencing the walk at all because I was thinking so intently about work. I physically stopped in my tracks, took a deep breath, and started walking again. It was time to slow down a moment, see what was around me, and breathe again.  Slow down.  When I worked at GE we had an expression, "sometimes you've got to go slow to go fast," and while that meant something slightly different than simply slowing do...

Making yourself the center of the universe is bad for you, and the universe doesn't care. It's bad for you because, ahem, you're not. I'm not. We don't even know WHERE the center of the universe is. I'm fairly sure it's not my town, my country, or even this world. That's that and that's that. The universe might have a sense of humor, but that's stretching a metaphor and anthropomorphism to the max. Stretch, yes -- but be careful of those metaphors. They have quite a recoil. -- doug smith

Centered Blue Bolts Our natural condition is centered. It's the distractions that pull us away. -- Doug Smith

Do you ever daydream about the past? How you would have done some things differently? If you could go back in time would you be the same person you are today? Of course, we can't go back in time, but we can learn from it. Things that we would change point in directions we might want to consider for now. People we might have offended may still be waiting for our amends. Opportunities we may have squandered might still be there -- or might beckon us toward new opportunities we have been missing. We don't need to regret what we missed. There's so much good that's still ahead of us. What have you learned from your past experiences? -- Doug Smith

Have you ever been so angry that it forced you to do something about the situation? There's tremendous energy in emotion. It can force us into doing something positive and definitive. Or, it can create an urgency that leads to problems. The key is keeping control. The power is in staying centered and strong. The opportunity is in maintaining your compassion as well as your courage, your clarity as well as your creativity. Once your emotion propels you into action, can you safely let it go? If you can, it will avoid much trouble. If you can't, trouble will catch you. -- Douglas Brent Smith